Looking Ahead

Will more sophisticated p2p replace physical music storage? What is the future of music delivery systems, and the fate of our beloved CD? Paul Sanders, of the highly cool state51 site, offers these thoughts:

I sometimes suspect that the answers to questions like these lie buried in arcane fields such as ergonomics and metaphysics, or perhaps they flutter between the superego and the id.

Just a suggestion; how much gratification is there beyond the collectivism and the music…? The struggle to open the jewel case (the difficulty of which is perfectly pitched to awaken our primitive rummaging and foraging). The slight stretch to encompass the disc, which make us feel we have slightly more than we can comfortably hold, pandering to the greed which springs from our once uncertain existence. The first penetration as our index finger finds the central hole, followed by the glance at our self in the mirror of the underside, a validation of power and self-love. And finally the full penetration as the tray slides into the player.

Or perhaps (Lou Reed’s ‘Stupid Man’ is playing as I type this) the ubiquity of the CD is one monumental cock-up, or the result of an immutable law that order is the successor to chaos, or perhaps the result of a massively complex interplay between individuals and groups of people all playing different games.

Either way, it is difficult to predict the present, let alone the future. And we do tend only to see what’s labeled and put in front of us. But net distribution seems to me to gratify us in different ways, while the silver disc remains potent; and music looks sorry for itself at the ‘big’ end and highly fragmented and isolationist at the local and community end.

Not very pithy, I know, but maybe the format question in all its dark mystery should have the pith taken out of it occasionally.

Thought-provoking, besides being all English and whatnot.

Paul also points us to a little more technical approach to the question, a sample of which clogs the brain like oatmeal:

It is important to emphasise that the adaptation engines themselves are non-normative tools of Digital Item Adaptation. However, descriptions and format-independent mechanisms that provide support for Digital Item Adaptation in terms of resource adaptation, descriptor adaptation, and/or Quality of Service management are within the scope of the requirements.

But of course.